Launch your imagination and break the bonds of time and space with radio's highly acclaimed science-fiction anthology X Minus One! Produced in cooperation with science fiction magazines of the day, the series featured provocative stories by the genre's top genre authors. Ray Bradbury, Ernest Kinoy, Robert Sheckley, and more helped Americans of the 1950s look to the future. Dramatized with an atmosphere of excitement, top radio voices like Raymond Edward Johnson, Les Damon, Staats Cotsworth, Ruby Dee, Mandel Kramer, Joe DeSantis, and Bill Lipton gave voice to their visionary tales.

All of us fear and fantasize about what is to come - be it tomorrow or next year or for the next generation. Sixty-five years after its creation, radio's most successful early venture into adult science fiction continues to entertain - and to stimulate the imaginations of a whole new audience.

Close your eyes and see the future. Radio often explored the issues of the day by imagining the days to come - and never did it better than in the stories you'll hear in this collection! From 2000 Plus to Dimension X, this is Great Radio Science Fiction!

Countdown for blastoff x-minus five, four, three, two, x-minus one, fire! "From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future, adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds." Once again, these 18 digitally restored and remastered episodes are available from the Radio Spirits Archives Collection. This digital re-release of our long out of print cassette collection includes updated and corrected episode dates and series titles.

From the late 1940's through the 1950's, in a world where space travel and nuclear annihilation were no longer merely the stuff of fantasy, science fiction began to achieve a new popularity. And, the work of noted genre writers began to be adapted in movies and radio programs. Based (however implausibly) on science, these radio broadcasts reflected the depths of the nation's fears, and the boundlessness of its imagination.

Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.

Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication.

Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Onward into the future with radio's most acclaimed science fiction anthology! From producer William Welch, script editors Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, and a rocket full of the genre's most respected authors come 18 classic episodes of X Minus One!

Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to fans of the New York Times best seller The Cat Who Walks through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, he is dead.

July 12, 1939: Perry Nelson is driving along the palisades when another vehicle swerves into his lane, a tire blows out, and his car careens off the road and over a bluff. The last thing he sees before his head connects with the boulders below is a girl in a green bathing suit, prancing along the shore.

The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation....

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive - and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. But Mark isn't ready to give up yet.

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

All of us fear and fantasize about what is to come - be it tomorrow or next year or for the next generation. Sixty-five years after its creation, radio's most successful early venture into adult science fiction continues to entertain - and to stimulate the imaginations of a whole new audience.

Close your eyes and see the future. Radio often explored the issues of the day by imagining the days to come - and never did it better than in the stories you'll hear in this collection! From 2000 Plus to Dimension X, this is Great Radio Science Fiction!

Countdown for blastoff x-minus five, four, three, two, x-minus one, fire! "From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future, adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds." Once again, these 18 digitally restored and remastered episodes are available from the Radio Spirits Archives Collection. This digital re-release of our long out of print cassette collection includes updated and corrected episode dates and series titles.

This collection features four classic, dramatized Robert Heinlein stories: "Universe", "Requiem", "The Green Hills of Earth", and "The Roads Must Roll".

Robert A. Heinlein has been hailed as one of the most forward-thinking science fiction writers of all time, and Expanded Universe (presented in two volumes) offers the perfect collection of his works to provide listeners with true insights into his uniquely creative mind.

Onward into the future with radio's most acclaimed science fiction anthology! From producer William Welch, script editors Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, and a rocket full of the genre's most respected authors come 18 classic episodes of X Minus One!

Don Harvey is a citizen of the Interplanetary Federation - yet no single planet can claim him as its own. His mother was born on Venus and his father on Earth, and Don himself was born on a spaceship in trajectory between planets. When his parents abruptly summon him away from school on Earth to join them on Mars, he has no idea he's about to be plunged into deadly interplanetary intrigue. But the ship Don is traveling on is unexpectedly diverted to Venus, where the colony has launched a revolution against Earth's control.

This collection from grand master Robert A. Heinlein includes five short stories sure to please science fiction fans everywhere. The title story tells the tale of a young man who meets a time-traveling bartender whose origins - and relation to the young man - are more complex and stranger than the Ouroboros ring on the barkeep's finger.

Robert A. Heinlein has been hailed as one of the most forward-thinking science fiction writers of all time, and Expanded Universe (presented in two volumes) offers the perfect collection of his works to provide listeners with true insights into his uniquely creative mind.

If there's one lesson to be learned from science-fiction, it's that nothing lasts forever. From human lives to vast civilizations, the overarching theme of the genre is that the old will give way to the new. Look to futures past with X Minus One! One of the most imaginative series of the 1950s brings you to adventures in worlds beyond fear, beyond imagination, beyond the farthest stars. Works by the leading genre authors of the day (including Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford Simak) were turned into tight, well-acted half-hour dramatizations.

Time Enough for Love is the capstone and crowning achievement of Heinlein's famous Future History series. Lazarus Long is so in love with life that he simply refuses to die. Born in the early 1900s, he lives through multiple centuries, his love for time ultimately causing him to become his own ancestor. Time Enough for Loveis his lovingly detailed account of his journey through a vast and magnificent timescape of centuries and worlds. Using the voice of Lazarus, Heinlein expounds his own philosophies, including his radical ideas on sexual freedom.

This volume is the definitive collection of the best science fiction novellas published between 1929 and 1964, containing 11 great classics. No anthology better captures the birth of science fiction as a literary field. Published in 1973 to honor stories that had appeared before the institution of the Nebula Awards, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame introduced tens of thousands to the wonders of science fiction and was a favorite of libraries across the country.

Jonathan Hoag has a curious problem. Every evening, he finds a mysterious reddish substance under his fingernails, with no memory what he was doing during the day to get it there. Jonathan hires the husband and wife detective team of Ted and Cynthia Randall to follow him during the day and find out. But Ted and Cynthia find themselves instantly out of their depth. Jonathan leaves no fingerprints. His few memories about his profession turn out to be false.

Robert A. Heinlein is widely and justly regarded as the greatest practitioner of the art of science fiction who has ever lived. Here are two of his greatest short novels: Gulf, in which the greatest super-spy of them all is revealed as the leader of a league of supermen and women who can’t quite decide what to do with the rest of us. And Lost Legacy, in which it is proved that we are all members of that league - or would be, if we but had eyes to see.

Five seminal science fiction classics are brought vividly to life in these gripping BBC Radio dramatisations, with casts including Robert Glenister, William Gaunt, Carleton Hobbs and Joanne Froggatt. Titles include Frankenstein (1994), The Time Machine (2009), The Lost World (1975), R.U.R. (1989) and Solaris (2007). Accompanying this collection is a bonus PDF file featuring extensive sleeve notes by Andrew Pixley.